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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I have sympathy with the technical and debugging plight but genuinely why are people still dealing with this, SMS/RCS is to the US what fax machines are to Japan. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Any bog standard IP based messenger has had none of these issues and all of the features that RCS is supposed to fix for a decade.

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That’s the best part: RCS is an IP based messenger

But it's still tied to your carrier. I'd really prefer to keep my communication disconnected from my connectivity provider. These should be two completely separate services that I can manage independently. I just want my mobile provider to provide internet. Full stop. Nothing else. But of course they want to inject themselves into as much of my life as possible to make themselves stickier with a nice side of siphoning up more data.

Imagine a world where your ISP also separately provided an IRC messaging service. Why would you ever use that over actual IRC?

This is how I feel about SMS, and phone numbers too for that matter. They're still around for historical reasons, but if we started anew, I can't imagine we would build out that infrastructure separately from the greater internet, and if we would have, I can't think of a reason why.

RCS is basically email over HTTP, wrapped in a layer of carrier stuff. The same way Visual Voicemail is IMAP but wrapped in a layer of carrier stuff.

The spec also handles video calls, conference calls, sending/receiving money, and just about anything else a modern messenger does.

It just lacked E2EE for the longest time, which makes sense when you consider that the police and secret service have their tendrils in the standards body that publishes the spec.

does it handle group chats, synchronization of messages, identity verification (for e2ee)?

Group chats and just about everything else messaging clients have supported for a decade are part of the Universal Profile that came out nine years ago (file sharing, location sharing, audio messages, etc., although Signal still lacks location sharing so I guess RCS is still ahead of the curve here). These features will not always fall back well to SMS/MMS, though, according to the spec: https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...

Synchronisation is not part of the problem it's trying to solve (sending messages between devices), the same way SMS and MMS don't, so that's up to the apps implementing the protocol.

E2EE has been added very recently (https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo... came out a few months ago), and post-quantum encryption is still being developed. It uses standard MLS (RFC 9420) for messaging, so verification will have to be implemented however normal MLS implementations do it. I don't know if there's a standardised way to do it, I haven't fully read the most recent RCS spec yet.

I oversimplified RCS somewhat, it's not just HTTP wrapped in carrier stuff. It's also SIP, SDP, XML, OIDC, RTP, and JSON wrapped in carrier stuff. Still, page 428 of the second link shows an example of a POST request that you can make after combining all of the tidbits of specification that came before it, and that's where the simple JSON+XML shine through the stack of protocols that are tasked with delivering it. The E2EE layer is basically just sending base64'd encrypted messages over that same interface.

Apps won't be able to synchronize if the service doesn't support it and there is no protocol support for it?

The protocol makes sure a message sent from one phone/tablet/watch makes it to the other end. If you want to synchronise that message between your devices, you'll have to build that locally.

Apple, Google, and Samsung can synchronize SMS messages through their cloud services, so the same also goes for RCS. For more privacy-oriented folk, KDE Connect can also offer SMS messaging to the desktop by synchronising locally with a connected phone.

You're right, but between my carrier and Meta, I'd prefer to trust my carrier, even if it's just to know which window to throw a brick through. Maybe I'm being too European on this, but I'm not willing to hand over basic communications to private industry, especially companies whose entire business strategy is building profiles on people.

I still hope for a protocol to win out that's not tied to one party.

Between your carrier and Meta, the choice is clear, but your carrier is almost certainly not a saint. Between your carrier and literally and open source message service, Signal being the obvious one, the choice is again clear.

Not to mention that the choice isn't really between your carrier and Meta, but rather Google and Meta, since most people on Android end up just using Google servers for RCS, and that choice is much more of a toss-up.

"hey bro, just download this crappy totally trustworthy app and add me just to talk to me and only me!" is a patently ridiculous thing to try and sell people on.

I don't know, WhatsApp won my local market decades ago by not having to pay 10 cents per message. People didn't really care about encrypted chats until maybe ten years ago, and even today millions are using Telegram for their every day messaging. No idea what the security situation of Vibe and Facebook Messenger are these days, but their numbers also exceed the hundreds of millions together.

Nobody in the US uses these apps, and in my opinion, for the better.

I live in the US, how is this for the better?

We're stuck with iMessage, which Apple is actively hostile towards non-users. Even for me, who had an iPhone, it was a royal pain in the ass. What do you mean I can't see my messages online? I need a Mac? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm a paying customer, why am I being nickled and dimed?

That, and then SMS MMS. Which are so unbelievably bad they're basically worthless.

I shouldnt have to spend 2.5 thousand dollars to get an acceptable messaging experience. I shouldn't. RCS isn't really helping, but the situation is absolutely NOT for the better IMO.

>is a patently ridiculous

It's patently ridiculous to trust the Signal Foundation more than phone carriers? I wasn't aware that AT&T and T-Mobile are run for the benefit of humanity.

Any app that implements RCS is run by gigantic corporations, most of which I'd argue are closer to the US government than even Meta, it's not obvious to me where the ridicule comes in.

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